We at Evermore give a lot—we put our hearts and souls into sourcing the finest ingredients from vendors committed to animal welfare and environmental stewardship and cooking the most consistent, beautiful, nutrient-rich, toxin-free food possible, and we put A LOT of time and love into answering each call and email personally and treating all our customers like the VIP’s they are to us. In fact, for most of the time we have been around, we have given much more than we have received, at least financially. As our business grows (thanks to you!), it has become clear that there is one area where giving has become too costly. So after much deliberation, we have decided to opt out of running holiday sales.
There’s so much pressure for companies to run promotions around the holiday season, even from places that ostensibly should be neutral. For example, when we log into the administrator view of our online store, the first thing we see is a running tally of the total number of sales for the day, total number of orders, site visitors and whether anyone is currently shopping our store. Beginning in August (yes, really), a countdown to the number of days remaining until “BFCM” (shorthand for Black Friday Cyber Monday) also appeared. Immediately beneath this is now a link to a blog post outlining 27 steps to prepare one's business for the upcoming bacchanalia of buying. This four-day discount marathon has become as American a tradition as Thanksgiving itself.
As consumers, we’re keeping an eye on the upcoming sales. As a business, however, it doesn’t make sense for us to participate for a number of reasons. Here are a few:
We always offer the highest quality possible at the lowest price that is sustainable for us. Our top-shelf ingredients come to us at top-shelf prices. There is very little economy of scale with ingredients at the quality level we choose to buy. Despite the rising cost of our raw materials and transport, we have managed to avoid levying price increases on our customers for several years.
If you’ve ever had a courier delay or other form of delivery issue with us, you know that we are have a very generous replacement policy (unlike some other companies, from what we’ve heard from some of you). When we reship a package, we are losing money on an order, but we couldn’t imagine a world in which it is okay for a customer not to receive what they paid for in a useable condition. Between 11/26 - 12/24, UPS and FedEx suspend their money-back guarantees for prompt delivery of ground orders. These guarantees do not even include the value of any product that may be lost, just the shipping fees themselves. Additionally, the separate insurance we purchase for product loss (only through UPS) is voided during this time period. Given these reduced assurances from our couriers, it would not be wise for us to do anything to incentivize a glut of orders, especially from new customers.
We’re already growing pretty darn quickly! Thanks to our happy customers singing our praises and Whole Dog Journal’s recent glowing review, plenty of people have been finding us. In order to keep our products consistently available at our unparalleled quality level (while still paying our own bills), we have to be careful not to over or under produce. We welcome and need this natural growth, but a drastic spike in sales—at a time when we will likely be replacing a lot of product due to courier errors—will sabotage our carefully considered production schedule. Please, by all means, keep spreading the word though!
This one’s kind of the elephant in the room... but the number one reason people indicate that they stop using our products is because they cannot afford them. We know that the quality we provide comes with a cost, and we do everything we can (including sending recipes) to help our customers figure out how to work Evermore into their budgets. That said, we do not believe we are doing anyone any favors with a one-time drastic reduction in prices when pet food is an ongoing expense. We do give customers the opportunity to regularly see some savings by referring friends and choosing to become subscribers.
As we continue to work our tails off to bring you the best food possible for your pups, we wish you and your packs a very happy Thanksgiving, and good luck on scoring some killer deals in the days after!